The Algerian Government publicly accused Israel yesterday of sponsoring an armed plot to topple the pro-Nasser regime of Premier Ahmen Ben Bella. In announcing the arrest of 10 members of an alleged “counter-revolutionary band, ” the Government said most of those detained were Israelis.
Word of the “plot” came from Information Minister Mouloud Belaouane who said Israel sought to halt the new “revolutionary Algerian policy” being pursued at home and in Africa by Premier Ben Bella’s “Socialist” regime.
This followed an announcement by Premier Ben Bella to the Union of Algerian Moslem Students that Razak Abdel Kader, a senior officer of the anti-French FLN, known for his pro-Israel sympathies, had been arrested for leading an insurrectionary movement. The Premier said Algerian gendarmes had captured Abdel Kader’s followers after a pitched battle at Dra el-Mizan in the Kabylia region, east of Algiers, where several resistance groups were said to be operating.
KADER REPORTED FRIENDLY TO ISRAEL; BEN BELLA THREAT RECALLED
Razak Abdel Kader wrote a book on the Arab-Israeli conflict, published in Paris two years ago, in which he traced the origins of the Arab-Israeli War and concluded that both sides would benefit from mutual understanding. He reportedly spent one year working on an Israeli kibbutz while Palestine was still under the British Mandate, and experience that led to his hope that the kibbutz idea could be applied to Algeria.
The book attracted considerable attention because of Abdel Kader’s reputation as a personality close to the FLN leadership. Observers believed at the time that the book expressed the official FLN line on the Arab Israel dispute, but that the FLN was forced to reassess its judgment when Ben Bella became the dominant force in the movement. It was recalled here that, even before Ben Bella had risen to the leadership of Algeria, he had promised Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser that he would raise an army of 100, 000 Algerians to help “liberate” Palestine from Israeli rule.
In announcing the “Israeli plot, ” Information Minister Belaouane and other officials stressed that Algeria’s 6,500 Jews–the remnant of the pre-independence community of 140, 000–had nothing to fear.
(In New York, the National Broadcasting Company transmitted a report from its Algiers correspondent, Paul Davis, to the effect that Israel had suddenly become the chief target of Algerian press hostility.)
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